Elephant Dung Paper to Trains from the Past
Energy shifts are little scary. But remember: Yesterday’s fears are today’s nostalgia.
Before today’s post, I want to note we’re now in the backstretch of our India climate and energy journey. We’ve reached the city of Bengaluru after riding the rails from Kolkata across India’s north to Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat and then down the Arabian Sea coast as far as Mangalore. Today we visit the Deccan plains as we travel to the Bay of Bengal. There we’ll stop at the abandoned city of Rameshwaram, victim of a climate event more than a half century ago, before turning north to Chennai, the state of Orissa and back to Kolkata. Then there’s a last bonus leg of the journey, up into the Himalayas with a surprise stop where our adventure ends, or at least THIS adventure ends. There’s still a lot more to come. For those who joined along the way, you can find posts from all my previous stops in the archives of this blog.
Now, on to Bengaluru and one of the most fascinating people I met on my journey.
Technologies transition. The tools we use evolve. Or we evolve them, if I can put it that way. Stone to iron, which gets replaced by bronze; clay is exchanged for paper, which gets displaced by liquid crystal displays; horses pull carts, which become cars.
Happens in energy, too: fire to photons to…well, we really don’t know yet. Maybe nuclear fusion someday, a veritable sun in our pocket.
Perhaps oddly, we respond emotionally as these technologies come and go. We fear them until we miss them. Fire inhabits our nightmares as we harness it to realize our dreams.
The 1955 film Pather Panchali, by legendary Bengali director Satyajit Ray, captures this ambivalence in its opening scene. It is the dawn of the modern age in early 20th century Bengal. Teenage Durga and her little brother Apu stand under a matrix of foreign, buzzing electrical transmission lines. They walk into a field of tall grass and wait — for the whistle of the train.
When they hear it, Apu races towards it. The locomotive cuts a path across the screen, its thick, black smoke filling the sky. From the other side of the tracks, through the speeding rail carraiges, we see Apu stand in awe as the mechanical beast speeds towards the big city, his future. But we also know this scene takes place in retrospect. There’s a powerful sense of the director, our storyteller, looking back from that future.
Over time, we tame these technologies. We learn to leverage and live with them, and then we consign them to history. We wrangle our trepidation into affection, and then we package it up into nostalgia. It’s a necessary process, like grieving, that helps us move on to confront and conquer the next new technology. That’s what Satyajit Ray is doing with the Apu trilogy, a coming of age tale in which this movie is part one.
I’ve thought a lot about this since visiting T.R. Raghunandan, a retired elite Indian bureaucrat who spends much of his time fashioning exact scale models of historic steam locomotives out of elephant dung paper. Yes, that would be paper made from pachyderm poop. Raghunandan swears it’s uniquely suited for his purposes, soft and malleable yet durable.
We often think of energy transitions as purely technical undertakings. But as I explain in this earlier post, the most obvious challenges right now are less scientific than political and economic — the mire of vested interests, greenwashing and outdated business models. There are emotional and psychological impediments — fears, really, of change, of the unknown, of the daunting challenges ahead — holding us back, too. These hurdles are underappreciated, I believe, and more attention to clearing them away would help us through the thicket of our mid-transition malaise.
India’s railway moved from the last steam locomotive to fully electric ones in less than a generation. This happened so quickly partly because India was playing catch up. The newer technologies, first diesel then electric locomotives, already existed elsewhere and India subbed them. But this also involved a lot of cultural and social adjustment, first and foremost for the men who drove and kept up the steam locos.
Ceremonies were held to commemorate the retirement of these machines, and almost invariably the men who worked them. “Black Beauty Contests” marked their twilight years, drawing crowds and media coverage. It was the end of an era.
Raghunandan feels that same nostalgia. He grew up in Kerala in a family historically consigned to the lowest rank of Indian society. The were Dalits, once known as “untouchables.” His mother nonetheless became a medical doctor. She was 101 years old and lived nearby on her own when I visited Rhaghunandan last year,
Raghunandan studied at one of the country’s top universities and landed in India’s elite civil service. He worked on local governance issues and eventually retired, becoming an international consultant to encourage emerging democracies from Mongolia and East Timor. He had a moment of international acclaim when he started a website, I Paid a Bribe, which encouraged regular citizens to admit each time they paid a bribe, explain the circumstances and how they felt. It was a way of fighting, through empowerment by cathartic exposure, an endemic problem that hamstrings India’s economy and leaves many Indians ashamed and dispirited.
By folding, rolling and punching holes in Elephant poop paper, Raghunandan has continued the process of packing an era off to an emotionally manageable past so we can appreciate it, learn from it, and move on, confident in that knowledge.
“For me, trains and railway locomotives are all part of the romance of visiting my village,” he told me as we sat in the garden of a once-rural home now in a suburb of the city of Bengaluru. “My grandmother would tell stories at night and you would always hear this ghostly hoot of steam engines. And every time we would hear that we would run out and stand at the gate from where you could see the train 200 or 300 meters away. You would wave at the train. It’s one of the enduring memories of my childhood. We always had such affection for the train. It made all this fuss when it went by. So busy, with all those levers working. It sets off something in your mind.”
Today his models are fantastically detailed, miniature reincarnations of actual historic locomotives right down to the number and placement of faux rivets.
Raghunandan sees these machines as the culmination of an era.
“Not a single electronic device in them,” he said. “The whole thing is mechanical. And if you break it down, all based on principles you learned in the sixth grade. Electricity was a paradigm shift, when you’re dealing with a motive force, an energy you cannot see. Here you can see the water being converted into steam by the heat, you can sense the pressure the steam creates. From there it’s about levers and gears and wheels and springs. This is caveman logic carried to its final pinnacle of evolution.”